Colin Ellard of The Guardian browses through the pages of William Whyte’s book “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” to examine the significance of a psychologically grounded perspective of urban planning in building economically sound cities.
More than 30 years ago, the pioneering urbanist
William Whyte
was charged by the city of New York with the task of unraveling the
mysteries of public space. Why do some such spaces attract crowds of
happy visitors whilst others sit barren and empty?
Whyte's
research programme, conducted with stopwatches, time-lapse videography,
and lots of simple paper charts, was a spectacular success. Based on his
findings, he made a series of simple and easily implemented
recommendations that the city soon codified into its municipal
construction codes.
Today, any visitor to New York might find any
number of things to complain about but the wide availability and
attractive human affordances of the city's many public spaces is not
likely to be among them. Whyte's epiphany was that the way to answer
important questions about how to build a commodious and psychologically
healthy city lay in careful observation, collection of data and the
creative ability to lay aside preconceptions and view a streetscape with
a "beginner mind".
Whyte's book
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and the
short film
based on this work, are as fresh and insightful now as the day that
they appeared, and are required reading and viewing for any student of
urban behaviour.
Fast forward a few decades, and many things have
changed, but the fundamentals remain the same. If we want to know how to
make a better city, the place to start is at ground level, using
observation and measurement, and applying what is known of the human
sciences to those measurements to build a psychologically grounded view
of the relationship between the physical design of a city and what
happens there.
What has changed dramatically is the set of tools
that are available to those who would understand the detailed workings
of the urban realm. Now we can go well beyond simple observations of the
overt behaviour of city dwellers. We can look inside the bodies and
minds of those who inhabit urban spaces. We can measure their gaze,
their beating hearts, and the state of their autonomic nervous systems
as they react to arousing and stressful events.
We can also
measure their brainwaves. We can, if we are willing to carry specially
designed apps on our mobile phones, record our location and movements,
but also our moods, interests, and our patterns of thought. New
affordable devices for measurement of a host of brain and body variables
are reaching the consumer marketplace every day, and many of them can
be paired with phones.
There is even a recipe for a DIY brainwave
headset that consumers can print for themselves with a 3D printer and
use with openly available software. The wide availability of sensors
that measure our physiology, powerful, mobile, computing platforms, and
information networks that can connect us to research laboratories with
interests in urban behaviour has vaulted the methodologies used by Whyte
into a toolbox filled with unprecedented and exciting opportunities to
harness huge amounts of psychological data to make sense of how a city
works.
For a fully realised science of urban
psychology
though, it isn't enough to have a powerful array of methods for the
collection of data. We also need theory and experiment. For a truly
scientific approach to the problem of the city, we need to be able to
test hypotheses, and compare alternative urban realities. But how can we
do this when our subject matter consists of vast constructions of
concrete, glass and metal? We can't tear down and rearrange city blocks
to see what works. In tandem with our arsenal of tools for measurements,
we need a way to build hypothetical city spaces. How do we develop an
experimental science of urban design?
In the research laboratory
for immersive virtual environments (Relive) at the University of
Waterloo, we have turned to simulation methods to help build such a
science. Participants are placed into highly immersive simulations of
city spaces using sophisticated head-mounted displays and precise motion
tracking. They are able to walk freely through photo-realistic
simulations of urban spaces that are replete with depth, colour, and
motion. We can monitor their gaze and their movements along with their
physiology using a set of unobtrusive sensors while they do so. One of
our environments is based on Shibuya, a hectic and seemingly chaotic
part of Tokyo with its
famous scramble crossing – one that allows pedestrians to cross from all directions.
The
use of 3D visualisations by architects and planners is not particularly
new – design professionals often use simulations to explore the look
and feel of a construction. What is new is the capability and will to
explore our reactions to such simulations at a fine-grained level of
analysis using sophisticated methods of data collection and analysis.
Using such methods, we can explore the behaviour of a visitor to a
virtual urban setting whose design, because it is built only of pixels,
is entirely under our control and can be arranged and rearranged with a
few keystrokes on a computer.
For example, in one recent set of
experiments, conducted by Kevin Barton of Relive, we designed a
stark-looking industrial setting consisting of about 30 city blocks. The
streetscapes were so designed to explore the impact of different types
of layouts on how we find our way and how the shape of an environment
influences attention, cognitive effort, and urban stress. One layout was
very orderly, like a Manhattan, Washington or Canberra, while another
was more organic and meandering, like New Orleans or London. We
discovered that the manner in which such cityscapes were explored, and
the psychological reactions to their design, varied strongly with their
overall "grammar".
Journeys through the systematic spaces were
stereotyped and efficient and accompanied by low levels of arousal and
attention. Journeys through the more chaotic spaces were longer, filled
with more hesitations, arousal and effortful attention. The value of
such findings is that they give us a set of powerful methods by which to
predict the psychological effects of an urban design before anything is
built.
Although there is no doubting the power of a virtual reality
simulation to unearth relationships between the organisation of the
built environment and the operation of our minds, we still need to
establish that our simulations are close enough to the real thing that
findings from our laboratory generalise to the lived-in environment of a
city filled with a hubbub of people, noise, smells, and traffic. For
this, there is no substitute for experimentation at street level. Our
approach has been to lead participants on walks through city spaces
while wearing gear that allows us to measure their cognitive and
emotional responses to what they experience.
In one such study,
conducted as a part of the travelling BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory, we were
able to show that views of green space not only caused people to become
happier but also changed their physiology – their autonomic nervous
systems showed strong signs of relaxation responses. Though such a
finding provides good ammunition for those who advocate for the
importance of refreshing oases of nature in dense
cities,
it was hardly a surprise to us. What is more interesting is that we can
reproduce these effects in simulations in our laboratory, meaning that
we are able to pinpoint exactly what aspects of natural views produce
such restoration.
In one such study, conducted by Deltcho
Valtchanov of Relive, we were able to produce physiological relaxation
using views of virtual nature that was just as dramatic as that seen in
visitors to real-world green spaces. In more recent work, we have shown
that a part of the relaxation response to natural scenes hinges on
specific properties of visual scenes that can be defined mathematically
(the relative proportions of finely detailed contours as opposed to the
more coarse "blobby" contours that are present in the image).
What
is exciting about this finding is both that it makes a good match with
what is known of the preferences of brain areas known to be involved in
reward and environmental preference, and that it provides a tool with
which to predict the restorative potential of an urban vista on the
basis of its visual properties, regardless of whether it contains trees
and grass. This might point the way to methods that could optimise such
effects in crowded cities where the space available for parkland is
severely limited.
The examples I have described suggest that a
marriage of laboratory-based virtual reality simulations with real-world
observations using smartphones and physiological sensors could form the
basis of a new and powerful discipline of experimental urban design
based on sound principles of psychology and neuroscience. As we move
into an exciting new era of city design in which engaged citizens have
never been more interested in how to make cities better, and in which
they can be provided with good tools to contribute to the efforts to do
so, we are poised to move into high gear.
We have ambitious plans
to move beyond these initial steps to build more comprehensive models of
both existing and hypothetical city spaces in our lab, and to provide
more tools to determine how to grow great cities. As we face an era of
daunting problems including population growth, changing energy balances,
urban densification, and climate change, the need for solutions has
never been more pressing. But on the positive side, our approach
provides a strong window of opportunity to entertain and implement
important changes.
Colin Ellard is an experimental psychologist at the University of Waterloo, Canada
Peter Kampfer was a city manager of Raton, N.M., who has earned accolades for his strong thrusts for the region’s economic and urban planning development. See his significant contributions in urban planning on this Twitter page.
